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The Art of the Deal

When Noboru Ishiguro died in 2012, it was only fair to wonder would happen to Artland, the company he helped found. But even five years ago, Artland was already a changed entity. In 2006, it had been subsumed into Marvelous, a computer games conglomerate which turned Artland into a limited company, and then split it into two in 2010. One part, the Artland Animation Studio, continued under its sole shareholder Kuniharu Okano, who toiled on shows such as the upcoming Seven Deadly Sins.

In 2015 the other part was entirely absorbed within Marvelous in order to “improve the efficiency of group management.” Let me translate that for you: the other part was a holding company for intellectual property – shares in anime franchises. You might like to call the late Ishiguro himself an asset of sorts, but his days were numbered, while the franchises he helped create live under copyright law for decades after his demise.

Meanwhile, in 2016, a chunk of ownership in the animation studio was sold to Emon, a subsidiary of the Chinese company Haoliners, in order to “strengthen production capacity.” What did they think they were buying? It surely wasn’t a stake in Macross or Legend of the Galactic Heroes, as they were presumably still part of Marvelous. Was it, perhaps, just the Artland name, so that any work brought in could be spirited off down a fibre-optic cable to cheaper animators in China? Okano’s company, if it truly is merely an “animation studio”, amounts to tables and chairs, pens and paper. It doesn’t own the people who work for it, and it may even only rent the real estate where it resides. True enough, it might be able to work its way out of debt, but why would anyone fund this if it doesn’t own anything?

Four days after the anime press reported Artland’s bankruptcy this July, a fuming Okano went public to assert that the company was trying to restructure its debts, but was by no means dead. He had, he claimed, a bunch of offers from new investors, although he had yet to take any of them up on it. However, the question that everybody is asking is whether Artland itself actually retains any intellectual property – part-ownership of any of the franchises for which it is listed as a co-producer – when surely all that stuff is still sitting in a filing cabinet at Marvelous? Artland is for sale… but what would any new investor really be buying?

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #167, 2017.